Columbia University

While Google Translate can help users understand words in more than 100 languages, there are thousands more dialects used around the world that remain largely a mystery to those who aren’t native speakers.

A team of Johns Hopkins University scientists is working to bridge that gap with the help of a $10.7 million federal grant from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s intelligence community.

They will use the funding to create a translation and information retrieval system for obscure languages.

Philipp Koehn, a computer science professor at Hopkins, is leading a team of about 20 researchers in a quest to build a system that...

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